


The Boney King of Nowhere

by FrostbitePanda



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 04:02:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3922150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder was a man of sweeping gestures and subtext and she had no doubt that he feels the thrum of her pulse through his lips. “Man, I’m glad to be back, Scully.”</p>
<p>Dreamland AU. One-Shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boney King of Nowhere

She is swallowed by white light and the warmth of an omnipotent wind. She closes her eyes against the intensity and time slips past her perception. She lets herself see after a moment -a day- and carefully, with a nervous tremor subtly unsteadying her, looks to the man standing next to her. 

He seems dazed, standing and barely breathing as he takes in his surroundings. The tall man with the porcupine hair and the light-dark eyes that she had taken for granted seemed to be getting up the nerve to turn his head her way. She glances quickly at the portly Morris Fletcher who had inhabited her partner’s own lean body for the past week. She pleads with every god that had ever been conceived by man that it wasn’t Mulder who glances out at her behind those watery eyes. 

“…Mulder?” Her voice is like molasses and she is almost shocked to hear it. She hadn’t expected to be able to speak at all and she directs the question to midair. Noncommitted territory that allows either man to answer her. 

“Scully?” She closes her eyes at the familiar mumble that answers her and turns toward him. She momentarily doubts her ability to read every nuance of his face like a painting.

“Mulder is that really you?” She whispers, holding a hand to his face and unable to fight the rasp in her voice. Just last night she had said farewell to him. She mindlessly fingers the smooth husks of the seeds still in her pocket with her other hand. She had been planning to scoop the bundle of seeds into her pockets every day, always remembering to return them to the dish on her nightstand before she did laundry. 

He wraps a hand around her wrist, turns his head almost imperceptibly and lays a soft kiss to the hollow there. Mulder was a man of sweeping gestures and subtext and she had no doubt that he feels the thrum of her pulse through his lips. “Man, I’m glad to be back, Scully.” He sounds as if he had just gotten off a plane from Australia, fresh from a spacecraft buried in the Antarctic ice.

She couldn’t recall the last time she had truly smiled. A smile that she felt in her entire body. One that almost hurt and was inadequate in the face of the joy and relief that she felt. 

She takes a shaky step to him and is suddenly encased in warmth and her cheek is pressed in the familiar crook of his shoulder, his tee smelling well worn and Muldery. And she is shaking. And she feels him shaking; the shockwaves are reverberating in her ribs. It takes a vague moment to realize that they are laughing hopelessly. 

~~~ 

For what seemed like a bleak eternity, she had succumbed to a life without Mulder. 

Maybe she would go into medicine like she had originally planned. She’d open her own practice and find that dashing businessman with the necktie and the pay raises and buy an over-sized house in the suburbs. They would line the back yard with a pine privacy fence, as opposed to a white-picketed one. They’d get a dog, or maybe two. Big dogs to make the house feel less empty. They’d adopt in the face of her infertility and she could get that Audi she always wanted. 

She could do all this and never have to utter the word “implausible” ever again. 

Never have to go on emergency runs for sunflower seeds despite the fact she didn’t have to. Or steal the last crab Rangoon from him just because he let her. Never have to bear another night in a cramped car as they plummeted down dark highways in search of shadowy informants and the phosphorescence of alien spacecraft. Never again have to endure his lengthy postulations, hours on her feet over an open corpse, bantering and teasing, innuendos and philosophical exchanges. She would never have to cut her eyes away from him when he felt someone watching him while he leaned his big feet on his desk and chewed a pen cap. Never have to pretend that he wasn’t raking his eyes over her body whenever she wore a new suit. Never oppose, argue and debate. Never use her intelligence, her wit and wiles. Never again would she have to take over emergency rooms and stand in defiance against her superiors and her better judgment. Never burn and spit and steel her female muscles against dark, faceless forces. 

Never fight for anything ever again. 

She wonders if that would be how life without Mulder would really resemble. She dismisses it quickly. The thought is beyond comprehension. Siren calls that once sounded loudly in her ears, but were now a distant and well-ignored annoyance.

Her world was always and never. Instants and eternities of denial and truths. Absolutes and variables both unspoken and undiscovered. All because Fox Mulder had been handsome and sarcastic and wholly not crazy when she walked into that office all those years ago. She had felt like she had stumbled upon a Homeric tragedy. His big brain and long legs crowded into that small office that was his realm of dusty files that were probably better off left dusty. A strong man with a predilection for flighty ditches and getting shot. A towering paradox… a boney king of nowhere, ruler of the intangible. 

She leans her head back against the seat of the car, her thoughts gathering on the elegant pinkie that touches her own like a hesitant moth. She feels absolved of some great and terrible sin and her blessing was the man in the seat next to her. 

“Hey, Scully, I think the World’s Largest Wheel of Cheese is near here.”

Fuck getting out of the car. She’d pay for gas for the rest of her life. 

~~~ 

“There's always a siren  
Singing you to shipwreck.  
(Don't reach out, don't reach out)  
Steer away from these rocks  
We'd be a walking disaster.  
(Don't reach out, don't reach out)”  
\-- There There (The Boney King of Nowhere) Radiohead


End file.
